Preparation for Reentry

When I came to India I tried to keep myself from daydreaming about my life in the States--I didn't want to crave one place while residing in another. I wanted to embrace fully Indian's "live-in-the-moment" way of life. And for the last seven months that meant living in India. So there I was on my last long bus ride, I was leaving for the States in less than four days. The girls in my group teased me that I would be so weird when I got home. And I knew they were right. I had tried in the last three weeks not to talk too much of home since the girls weren't leaving for another two weeks. I realized I wasn't quite ready to go home. So I thought to myself, "OK Liann you have got start thinking about going home. You don't want to be too weird on reentry."

Thoughts I had previously forced out of my head were now welcomed in with all their vividness. Images of my parents' three-story home, large dinners of Thanksgivings past, warm showers, my overly abundant wardrobe, and my little gray Sentra came and went as I watched the lush green plants of India pass by. More vivid images rushed in: my brothers and sisters, my nieces and nephews, my friends--all dressed in nice, clean clothes, some with expensive cell phones and new cars. I pictured conversations I'd have with my family, trying to summarize my "foreign" experiences trying to understand what they found important in the last seven months of their lives.

My thoughts were interrupted as the bus came to a stop. The trees gave way to a dusty bus stop. About 10 men dressed in lungis and thread bare button-up shirts swarmed the bus. Each carried a basket full of some fruits or vegetables to sell; most carried cut up cucumbers. Each man rushed to a different window yelling to the passengers inside, sometimes even pushing the bag into the window forcing the vegetables on unsuspecting persons.

Instead of the feeling annoyed like I usually do when I get bombarded with aggressive salesmen, I saw these men for what they were: people, men, most likely husbands and fathers with more than their own mouth to feed. Questions came to mind. How many bags of 10 rupee cucumbers a man must sell in a day to provide for his family? What happens if he doesn't sell all the bags? Is he able to store and sell them again tomorrow? All I know is these men were fighting in this small town bus stand to sell what they had.

I normally don't get emotional about these kinds of scenes in India--they happen regularly. It's just the way of life here--poor people beg every day. Especially after living the life of a villager for so many months (carrying my own water, eating at humble roadside stalls, experiencing the regular power outages) it didn't feel needful to mourn their lifestyle. However, that day the gap between my own life in America and the lives of these men felt so wide. I fought back tears. I had seen so much poverty in the last seven months but not yet mourned it and I wasn't ready to cry over it all here on this crowded hot bus.

I remember talking with a European woman while I was in Thailand who had visited India. She described passing begging children on the street her first day in Delhi. She took them to an ice cream stall and bought each one of them ice cream then went to her hotel and cried and cried over the poverty she had seen. As I listened to her story I felt myself do a mental shrug. "What an overreaction" I thought. Then worry filled me! "Has living in India so long really made my heart so callous?"

I don't know the answer to that. I do know what I felt that day on the bus. I also know I don't feel compelled to dedicate my life to international development. I've seen a little more of the world than some and understand the magnitude of the things I own, but also the burden they bring at times. I'm very privileged materially, but also didn't see much of my father while growing up. So here I am, in America wondering how I'll ever put all these beautiful, painful, and sometimes strange life experiences in some sort of perspective. It's all just piecemeal, no simple and beautiful conclusion--kind of like how they are presented on this blog, one random story after another. That's life I guess. And if struggling with that makes me a little "weird" on reentry...well so be it.